A Tool Suite to Enable Web Designers, Web Application Developers and End-users to Handle Semantic Data

Abstract

Current web application development requires highly qualified staff, dealing with an extensive number of architectures and technologies. When these applications incorporate semantic data, the list of skill requirements becomes even larger, leading to a high adoption barrier for the development of semantically enabled Web applications. This paper describes VPOET, a tool focused mainly on two types of users: web designers and web application developers. By using this tool, web designers do not need specific skills in semantic web technologies to create web templates to handle semantic data. Web application developers incorporate those templates into their web applications, by means of a simple mechanism based in HTTP messages. End-users can use these templates through a Google Gadget. As web designers play a key role in the system, an experimental evaluation has been conducted, showing that VPOET provides good usability features for a representative group of web designers in a wide range of competencies in client-side technologies, ranging from amateur HTML developers to professional web designers.